Not that David Hawkins is much better. Hawkins is a trained
MD and psychiatrist, but decided to go rogue some years ago and gave up any
vestige of truth, evidence and accountability in favor of New Age mysticism
with a hint of orientalism. He currently runs his own Veritas publishing house
to publish his own books (such as Powers
vs. Force and Dialogues on
Consciousness and Spirituality) without having to deal with referees or people
who ask for justification and support for the claims he makes. In fact, Hawkins
is not only an MD, but a “Ph.D.” – from Columbia Pacific University,
an unaccredited diploma mill that was shut down by court order (Jerry Bergman also got his degree there); his thesis appears to have been Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis and
Calibration of the Levels of Human Consciousness, which probably doesn’t
need further comment.

You can find his ideas on the website
consciousnessproject.org, where he supposedly tells you how quantum physics validates applied kinesiology (AK) (by handwaving, assertion and assuming that the
audience doesn’t know anything about quantim physics). Yes, Hawkins has discovered
that the insane pseudoscience of AK (a good survey of AK tricks here)
is a good vehicle for New Age bullshit, and he runs with it as far as he can:
His website can even tell you that “David
Hawkins conclusively proves the ability of kinesiological testing to
distinguish truth or falsehood in any statement ...” (of course, we don’t
get anything like a proof, but you
know). AK can also serve as a reliable test for how spiritually advanced a
person (or corporation, or nation, or piece of music) is; Hawkins has
“developed” a consciousness-scale from 0 to 1000 (“consciousness” apparently
refers to some kind of spiritual entity; the parallel midichlorians is striking);
scoring above 700 means “enlightenment” (Jesus is at 1000; Hawkins himself
merely at 999.8). Meanwhile, skeptics score at 140 (“which is that of sophomoric egotism;”
Hawkins doesn’t like skeptics), and anyone who doesn’t believe that AK works
automatically ranks below 200 (and one shouldn’t fraternitize with them); George W. Bush scores at 460 (in
the range of intellectual genius). According to Hawkins’s acolyte, David
Gersten (another MD): “Below 200 an
individual or society are at very high risk. Up until 1986, the world CS
calibrated in the low 190s, but there was a sudden shift in 1986, taking the
world CS to 207, which is a safe place to be. The reason for this positive
shift is unknown.”

Apparently it is all on his Map of Consciousness. Before his
own lectures, he tests the audience to see how they locate as a group on the
Map; the groups always start out very high, but after the lectures, when
Hawkins retests them, they have nevertheless always gone up another five points
or so – it’s just as surprising every time. Since very few people, according to
Hawkins, climb more than five points in a lifetime, the tests prove that his
lectures were a good investment. So it goes.

Diagnosis: This guy appears to be quite influential, despite
the staggering idiocy of his claims and techniques. He does come across as a
true believer rather than a fraud. I don’t know whether that puts him in a less
or a more negative light.